HE ROLE OF AN AUTHOR
as architect of his characters' destinies is a leit-motif in Cervantes'
fiction. The object-image conveying an author's control over his characters
is an implied or a manifest puppet-string. It reappears throughout Don
Quijote under several disguises: a rein, a thread, a rope, a line, a
spike on a balcony, a hook in a tree, a cable, a whip, a cord, a girth, a
net. Each of these object-images provides a thread of constantly recreated
or extended metaphor of authorial control.
From the interplay between the narrative level
of fiction abounding in action and dialogue about life styles, ideals, and
ethics, and the metaphoric level of fiction pictorially conveying Cervantes'
view of life, there emerges the author's indirect portrayal of Don Quijote,
Sancho, their chronicler, Cide Hamete Benengeli, of Maese Pedro, the puppeteer,
and even of Avellaneda, the author of the apocryphal Don Quijote.
It is in chapter eight of Part I where we first
find an allusion to the puppet-strings. This chapter ends abruptly with Don
Quijote, arm in mid-air, about to deal the Basque a defeating blow.
On the narrative level, the arrested confrontation
between Don Quijote and the Basque follows the pattern found in so many
contemporary and earlier stories in which episodes are interrupted for the
purpose of creating suspense. In Cervantes' novel the main

51

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purpose is to introduce a chronicler, Cide Hamete
Benengeli,1 as the author of the interrupted
narrative so as to cast doubts2upon his
reliability as a historian. The narrator seriously and explicitly questions
Cide Hamete's qualifications to relate Don Quijote's adventures. He even
goes so far as to warn the reader that if anything good is found
missing in the story it is the fault of its dog of an author rather
than any default in the subject [Don Quijote] (I, 9). How does this
discussion relate to the mid-air action interruption?
On the pictorial level, the mid-air action
interruption offers a graphic analogy to the literary discussion. Cervantes'
live characters, Don Quijote and the Basque, have suddenly turned into puppets
at the hands of the chronicler Benengeli. The apparently self-generated
motivations when their creator, Cervantes, was in command now seem to be
controlled by noticeable if not visible authorial strings held by the chronicler
who leaves the contenders suspended.
Cervantes is graphically addressing the reader
on the subject of make-believe manipulation as opposed to authentic character
creation. By interrupting the story so abruptly the focus has shifted from
the characters to their authors, from a physical confrontation to an intellectual
confrontation. The continuity of the story is being preserved, however, since
the thrust of the episode falls upon the truth of the characters independently
of their chronicler.
Another example in Part I where Cide Hamete
and Cervantes are writing the same story with a different focus occurs in
chapter forty-three. Don Quijote is summoned in jest by the innkeeper's daughter
to come close to a hole in the loft. His response to the lovesick
lady

1 The
role played by Cide Hamete Benengeli, Cervantes' surrogate author, has been
studied by many critics, among them Haley, Riley, Wardropper, Forcione, Allen,
El Saffar, Percas. Edward C. Riley's article Three Versions of Don
Quixote, Modern Language Review, 68 (1973), 807-19, and John
J. Allen's The Narrators, the Reader and Don Quijote, Modern
Language Notes, 91 (1976), 201-12, are significant contributions toward
a more perceptive understanding of the surrogate author's role. Allen indicates
the need to differentiate between what the author says and what Cervantes
implies. As in my paper Sobre el enigma de los dos
Cervantes,The American Hispanist, 2 (March, 1977), 9-11,
in the present paper I attempt to show Cide Hamete's function within the
novel and the extent of his participation in the writing of it.2 Earlier writers
invented chroniclers to authenticate their fictions. See Bruce W. Wardropper,
Don Quixote: Story or History, Modern Philology ,
63 (1965); also Allen, Percas.

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is to stand on Rocinante's saddle so as to reach the window in
the castle and offer his hand, not to be kissed he
informs her but to be admired for its strength (italics mine).
Nevertheless, the sensuousness of the gesture cannot fail to be noticed by
the reader. Maritornes, the sassy maid at the inn, fetches the halter of
Sancho's ass, ties a running knot in one end over Don Quijote's wrist, and
fastens the other end to the bolt of the hay-loft door. Don Quijote's precarious
position on the saddle is brought up four more times by Cide Hamete: Don
Quijote was, as we have said, standing upon Rocinante; though
he longed to sit down on the saddle, he could do nothing but remain standing
or tug off his hand; Don Quijote concluded that he and his horse
would have to remain like that until the malign influence of the stars should
pass, or until another more learned enchanter [Cervantes, we sense] should
break the spell; Rocinante was bearing up his outstretched
master.
Now, the accident that breaks the spell occurs.
Rocinante moves when a horseman's mount comes to make endearing advances
to him. The analogy between Don Quijote and Rocinante is suggested by their
identical responses to amorous entreaties. Once more we are reminded of the
knight's position on his horse: Don Quijote's feet which were close
together, slipped and, sliding from the saddle, would have landed him on
the ground had he not been hanging by his arm. But immediately after
this last statement, Cide Hamete describes Don Quijote as left hanging so
near the ground that he almost kissed it with his feet
(italics mine). Although idiomatically used, the verb to kiss recalls
the earlier sensuous gesture. The closeness to the ground is now emphasized
four more times in the remainder of the paragraph. He could touch
it [the ground] with the tips of his toes , he felt
what a little way the soles of his feet were from the earth;
he was very much like someone put to the torture of the
strappado, in which the victim's feet neither quite touch
nor quite fail to touch the earth; and as he stretches himself
in the delusory hope that with a little more stretching he will
reach the ground  (italics mine).
The contradictions (Cervantes' or Cide Hamete's?)
between Don Quijote being suspended up high by taut reins and hanging low
when Rocinante moves is not easy to explain on the narrative level.
Clemencín admits he cannot understand how this
happened.3

3 See
note 34 to chapter 43 of his edition of Don Quijote. What is inadmissable
is to believe that the contradiction is not intentional on Cervantes' part.

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Within the context of the knight's amorous
illusions, however, the reader may perceive the transmutation from the pictorial
image of Don Quijote outstretched on the saddle by Maritornes' device to
the figurative image of the knight's internal conflict between his lofty
commitments to Dulcinea and his base desires for the lady behind the window.
The higher (literally) his physical inclination takes him Rocinante,
his physical self, is his support, the lower (figuratively) his lofty
ideal sinks the ground.
In an allegorical context, therefore, the rein
of Sancho's ass (again, an image of the body) used to tie Don Quijote's hand
(the organ par excellence of sensory perception) are implied puppet
strings held by Cervantes' wit to castigate the knight morally and physically
for his concupiscence. In the style of the Inquisition, the knight's body
is stretched almost to the breaking point because the offense is a serious
one.
Since Cide Hamete faithfully records all details
of Don Quijote's adventure, he falls into textual contradiction. The chronicler
writes about facts that oftentimes exclude human truths. Cervantes writes
about human truths that oftentimes are not sustained by the facts. When the
threads of the novelistic fabric become visible it is usually Cide Hamete's
fault.
This becomes more perceptible in Part Il.
Overwhelmed by admiration for Don Quijote, who is challenging lions, Cide
Hamete forgets his authorial role and launches a laudatory exclamation over
the knight's prowess. After this, he goes on to knit up the thread
of his story (II, 17),4 the narrator
informs us. The authorial strings (the thread) have suddenly become
visible.
As Part II progresses Cervantes perfects his
technique of contrasting a true creator to a mere puppeteer. In the Montesinos
cave episode (chapters 22-23) Sancho and the Scholar bind Don Quijote with
a rope before lowering him into the cave. After paying out a taut rope for
one hundred fifty feet, Sancho and the Scholar hoist it easily and
without weight for about one hundred twenty feet

before they feel a weight again. Commentators have repeatedly noted the
incongruity of a taut rope that has no weight. Again, no satisfactory explanation
can be found on the narrative level. On the pictorial level, however, the
incongruity suggests a symbolic meaning. While Don Quijote is dreaming inside
the cave his body has no weight. The reason is that he has been transmuted
into a figment of Cervantes' imagination and has lost his identity to take
on his creator's, much like what happens to the mystic's soul when it unites
with God.5 Don Quijote senses that he is no
longer himself, that he is some empty and counterfeit phantom,
and seeks to verify his identity by comically and irrelevantly feeling his
body.
Pictorially, then, what the reader
sees is a surrealist painting. He may or may not recognize it
as such, for the literal rope binding Don Quijote to the external world is
also an allegorical puppet-string invisibly manipulated by Cervantes but
visibly held, within the novelistic context, by Sancho and the Scholar, two
other true-to-life puppets. In his dream, Don Quijote can't walk
away from the rope binding him, with all his human authenticity about him
despite his change of identity. Cervantes' tacit discussion and practical
demonstration of authentic character creation emerges in the rope symbol
as one of the several literary themes found in the cave
episode.6

A comical variation of the notion of separation
of spirit and body is alluded to in three consecutive pseudo-mystic images
wrought in the episode of the enchanted boat (II, 29). Cervantes' metaphoric
authorial strings coincide with Cide Hamete's literal rope mentioned on the
narrative level. First, Sancho ties up his donkey and Rocinante (the physical
selves of master and squire) to the shore, the world, before he and Don Quijote
embark on a journey. Second, the journey becomes a spiritual voyage when
Don Quijote cuts the ropes fastening the boat to the river bank, society.
Third, the material ropes are transmuted into a mystical tie, the equinoctial
line that the boat is about to cross. After their aborted adventure, Don
Quijote suspects that two powerful enchanters must have met in opposition,
. . . the one frustrating the other's designs. One provided me
with a boat; the other threw me out. The reader who detects the allegorical
implications of Don Quijote's statements gets the image of Cide Hamete and
Cervantes struggling to control the strings of events. The result is that
Don Quijote and Sancho almost naturally drown.
Simple puppet manipulation in contrast to character
creation is the main theme in Maese Pedro's puppet show (II, 26). Maese Pedro
is the author of a drama inspired by a ballad about Melisendra's rescue from
captivity in Moorish land. The strings he so maladroitly manipulates become
a graphic literalization of his failure as a character creator. He is responsible
for Melisendra's awkward descent from a balcony. Her skirt gets caught on
a spike and her rescuer, Don Gaiferos, must forcibly pull his lady down to
the ground, before he manages to make her leap onto the croup of his horse,
astride like a man. A dramatic subject has been rendered
comical.7 Cervantes' invention is not only
charming, but a clever allusion to Maese Pedro's bad imitation of nature
or mimesis, in Aristotelian terminology.
An interesting variation on the relationship
between creator and created is found in the braying episode (II, 27). Two
aldermen from neighboring towns bray to elicit a response from a lost donkey.
Their

imitation of the donkey's nature is so perfect that they are
indistinguishable from their asses. This notion is graphically rendered in
a life-size painting of an alderman depicted as an ass in the action of braying.
A white satin background represents the pomp and refinement of his
office.8 The mutual compliments the aldermen
bestow upon each other for their braying abilities eventually lead to a
declaration of war between their town and a neighboring village. Don Quijote's
lucid speech on the five valid causes for engaging in combat rationally makes
the point of man's stupidity in declaring war over a trifle. Sancho's unfortunate
counterpoint attempt to improve on his master's speech by giving
a practical demonstration he brays of how easy it is to make
an ass of oneself is the aesthetic error that triggers the almost
averted war. Don Quijote's admonishment to Sancho in the words of the proverb
when did you find it a good thing to mention rope in the
hanged man's house? significantly brings back the rope symbol
with new content: that of man's self-destruction when he is dejado de
la mano de Dios and abdicates his divinely-endowed nature. This variation
on the rope symbol indirectly reveals Cervantes' orthodoxy: free will should
be exercised to assume ultimate responsibility for one's
actions.9 The idea is expressionistically
conceived and surrealistically conveyed.
Still another variation on the theme of the
author's skillful string manipulation is found in the hunting scene at the
ducal estate (II, 34). The focus is on Sancho and his donkey Dapple, representing
the owner's simplicity and down-to-earth nature. The sustainer of the
other half of my person he once called his donkey in tender recognition
(I, 23).

8 Goya's
print, Tú que no puedes (I dare you), from
the Caprichos series, seems to have been inspired by this episode.
The print represents two brutish looking men holding two contented asses
on their shoulders.9 Every
man is the architect of his own destiny (II, 66), Don Quijote will
movingly declare after his defeat at the hands of the Knight of the White
Moon. Don Quijote seems to assume full responsibility for his overthrow:
I have lacked the necessary prudence, and so my presumption has brought
me to disaster . . . , But, without transition,
he goes on to blame his horse for his defeat:
...for
I should have reflected that feeble Rocinante could never withstand the mighty
bulk of the Knight of the White Moon's horse. Don Quijote's semi-admission
of his responsibility conveys Cervantes' conviction that even the noblest
of men fall to self-deception. The knight's retraction is Cervantes' subtle
brush stroke in his characterization of the loveable yet intransigent and
fallible idealist.

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Sancho steps out of his nature when he goes
hunting and puts on the green hunting suit given him at the ducal palace.
He refuses, nevertheless, to ride other than Dapple both the literal
donkey and a graphic embodiment of his nature whom he dared not
abandon for fear that some accident might befall him. But, when the
boar comes, the terrified Sancho does abandon Dapple, now the literal donkey,
and tries to climb to the top of an oak tree. One of the lower branches breaks
and falls to the ground while Sancho is left dangling, head down, caught
on a fork in the tree by his green hunting suit. Dapple, however, Sancho's
nature once again, does not abandon his master in his calamity and stands
beside him. The literal-minded Cide Hamete, unaware that he is sometimes
looking at a literal ass and sometimes at a symbol, naïvely attempts
to explain away the inconsistency of Dapple being left behind yet standing
beside Sancho, by remarking that he seldom saw Sancho without seeing
Dapple, or Dapple without seeing Sancho: such was the friendship and loyalty
between them (II, 34).10 Cide Hamete
seems to have forgotten Sancho's recent disloyalty, or to ignore that the
details he so faithfully records reflect the squire's newly-born ambition
to climb to the highest social class, the aristocracy the very top
of the tall oak tree. Sancho fails to make it even to a lower branch since
it breaks. As his green hunter's suit tears, the squire feels he is losing
with it an estate un mayorazgo).
As for the reader, he must choose between finding
Cervantes inconsistent or careless, or conceiving of Dapple as Sancho's
unrenounced nature and of the tall oak tree as the squire's unrealistic
ambition.
The hanged man's rope in the aldermen's adventure,
an allusion to free will exercised to commit a symbolic suicide by imitating
the

10Rodríguez Marín wonders whether Dapple ran after his
master when Sancho left him behind (note 16 to chapter 34 of his edition
of Don Quijote). Clemencín, on the other hand, takes no notice
of this inconsistency but of repetitions such as how Sancho tried to climb
to the top of the oak tree, but couldn't climb to the top, and yet did make
it halfway up; and how the branch he was holding on to while trying to make
it to the top broke and fell to the ground while the squire couldn't fall
to the ground because he was left dangling by his suit (note 10 of his edition).
Clemencín suggests a clean up of Cervantes' text. Translators
usually abridge the passage. These repetitions, however, are strongly suggestive
of the superposition of Cide Hamete's meticulous description of what happened,
over Cervantes' metaphoric portrayal of Sancho as a failed social climber.

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donkey's nature, has been replaced in the hunting scene at the ducal palace
by an oak tree and its fork, an allusion to Sancho's attempted suicide for
assuming a role so unnatural to him when he goes hunting. In this episode,
the metaphorically graphic author's strings are not even detectable because
a skillful Cervantes has made them coincide with nature: the oak tree and
its fork. Sancho's characterization is being developed not only effectively
but unobtrusively.11 Behind the fiction we
sense a good-humored allusion to Aristotle's theory of mimesis.
In a later episode (II, 55) Sancho and Dapple
are rescued from the dark pit into which they have fallen after Sancho leaves
the governorship of Barataria. Elsewhere, I have discussed the allegorical
meaning of this misadventure.12 It is analogical
to Don Quijote's dream adventure in Montesinos' cave, with the significant
difference that Sancho is wide awake. His introspection and self-discovery
are fully conscious and lucid. He knows that his follies and
fantasies have brought him to the present state, that he really belongs
with his ass. The literal ropes and cables that bring both of them up from
the darkness of the pit to the light of the sun are symbols
of Sancho's rediscovery of his true nature. Shortly before, he has made his
peace with Dapple by symbolically giving him his last chunk of bread. Unlike
the rope bringing Don Quijote up from the cave of Montesinos weightless
while the knight is dreaming, because it is hoisting an illusion,
self-deception the ropes and cables bringing Sancho and Dapple to the
surface of the earth are heavy because they are

11 Far
more obtrusive author's strings are the cord of the pack saddle in which
Sancho catches his foot when he attempts to hurriedly dismount Dapple, and
the loosened girth holding Don Quijote's stirrup when he attempts to dismount
Rocinante (II, 30). The squire remains dangling, his face and chest touching
the ground. Don Quijote falls to the ground pulling along the saddle by the
stirrup. We sense it is Cide Hamete's pen recording the discomfiture which
happens as Knight and Squire meet the Duchess. For a moment, master and servant
look like puppets toppled by Cervantes' malicious design to suggest symbolically
and graphically that their encounter with the ducal couple marks the beginning
of their end, and to chastise his creatures for their character flaws: Don
Quijote for his presumption, Sancho for his ambition. An analogous punishment
is administered to Don Quijote at the ducal palace when a rope dangling with
sheep bells and a sack full of cats also with bells is let down into his
chambers with the result that the knight's face is all scratched by one of
the cats a figurative image of wooing Altisidora (II, 46).12Cervantes . . ., Chapter 11.

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hoisting a reality, self-knowledge. The conspicuously visible ropes and cables
are Cervantes' masterfully disguised authorial strings. They are invisible
as symbols because, once again, they coincide with nature.
An allusion to the hangman's whip as a variation
of the theme of an author's failure to pull the strings convincingly relates
to Avellaneda and his infelicitous manipulation of characters. One of them,
Don Álvaro Tarfe, Avellaneda's own invention, who happens to wander
into Cervantes' Part II, declares that he saved Don Quijote (the apocryphal)
from having his back tickled by the hangman (II, 72).Cervantes makes Don
Álvaro use criminal jargon (tickled palinease)
to refer to the hangman's whip, thereby uncovering the gentleman's roguish
psychology, also betrayed by his use of a second slang expression, le
hice muchas amistades instead of mercedes, of common usage
(I did him many kindnesses), to refer to his friendship with
Don Quijote. As a matter of fact, in Avellaneda's novel, Don Álvaro
befriended Don Quijote and Sancho for his own entertainment. Cervantes takes
over Avellaneda's strings, the hangman's whip, and repairs Don Álvaro's
unskillful portrayal of his invented
character.13
In contrast, Cervantes brings up the whip,
again authorial strings, as an instrument of self-flagellation when Sancho
is sentenced by Merlin (II, 35) to lash himself of his
own free will a delightful contradiction in terms for the
disenchantment of Dulcinea, whom the squire had passed off earlier as an
ugly and ill-smelling wench a heretical debasement of Don Quijote's
ideal. In this context, the whip is now a figurative image of Sancho's
conscience. The strings have been placed in his hands, so to speak. But Sancho
feels no remorse and postpones the flagellation indefinitely.
Don Quijote is exasperated by Sancho's constant
delays in restoring Dulcinea to her pristine state. The knight's fallacious
syllogism about truth when he pretends that it matters little whether his
squire lashes himself or someone else lashes him since the

13 On
the theme of Avellaneda's artlessness we find a charming variation of the
puppet-string image when the spurious Don Quijote is being discussed (II,
59). Sancho is depicted as a guzzler and a fool, with no humor
at all. The real Sancho is incensed. He voices Cervantes' satirical
scorn for Avellaneda when he says: let him play who knows the
strings (II, 59). Clearly, the reference is to an artist's control
of his instrument, in this case, the pen.

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efficacy lies in [Sancho] receiving the lashes, leads the knight to
getting Rocinante's reins the authorial strings of destiny in
an attempt to fulfill by force the prophecy of Dulcinea's disenchantment
(II, 60). On the narrative level, he fails because Sancho overpowers him.
Inversely, when Don Quijote is defeated by
the Knight of the White Moon, he follows his squire's suggestion to leave
his arms dangling from a tree just like the bandits they encountered earlier
in their wanderings. Intuitively, he is acknowledging his Maker's judgment:
his error lies not in embracing a high ideal but in attempting to uphold
it by force.
Another charming example of invisible authorial
strings is found after Don Quijote leaves the ducal palace. He imagines himself
the object of love on the strength of his spiritual endowments (II, 58).
At this point Cervantes lays before him nets of green thread that the
shepherdesses of the fake Arcadia meant for catching the silly little
birds that would fall for nature's green. It is Don Quijote who falls
into the nets and finds himself entangled in his Creator's threads, their
green color14 suggesting the knight's conceited
self-deception. In fact, in order to maximize his gallantry and courtesy
toward the shepherdesses he goes so far as to alter the Scriptures by saying
though some say that man's greatest sin is pride, I say it is
ingratitude.
In short, Don Quijote and Sancho are characterized,
not by Cide Hamete's insight, but by the reader's perception of what the
characters' statements and actions mean.
From this study of the recurrent puppet-string
metaphor one conclusion may be drawn. Tacitly but graphically a pointed
distinction is being made and sustained throughout the novel between Cervantes
as a masterful character creator and Cide Hamete, Maese Pedro, or Avellaneda
as mere manipulators, Cide Hamete a more